Patience and Predestination
by volturialice
Summary: On the morning of October 1st, 1917, sixteen-year-old Mary Alice Brandon awoke with words on her arm.


_warnings:_ mentions of period-typical homophobia

* * *

On the morning of October 1st, 1917, sixteen-year-old Mary Alice Brandon awoke with words on her skin. She already knew what they would say, but she held her arm up to the light anyway, admiring the elegant curl of the Y, the graceful waves of the M's.

_I'm sorry, ma'am._

Well, whoever he was, he had very nice penmanship. That boded well, Alice thought. She squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating very hard in the hopes of triggering a vision, but nothing came. The mysterious apology-maker would stay mysterious a while longer.

A few months ago, Alice had been pulling out some of Cynthia's knitting mistakes when the ball of yarn had slipped from her hands. It had rolled its unwinding way across the parlor floor as an image filled her mind: _I'm sorry ma'am_ in tall, swooping letters, crawling up the inside of a forearm like fine black lace. The arm was too small to belong to anyone but herself, and she'd recognized the freckles on the inside of her own wrist.

But here at last was the irrefutable proof that the words in the vision were hers!

Alice liked her words, she decided. They were very polite. She wondered what he would be sorry for—would he bump into her? Perhaps he was clumsy.

If not for her visions, Alice might have been tempted to go about bumping into every mildly attractive young man she encountered in the hopes of receiving an apology. But her particular intuition told her this was not how fate operated—that she couldn't _force_ her soulmate to appear through silly contrivances.

What was more, the apology itself presented a problem. No one in Biloxi would condescend to apologize to the odd (_not quite right unnatural got the devil in her_) Brandon girl, and nobody ever called a little thing like her _ma'am_. She supposed she might not meet her soulmate until she was older, and perhaps gray enough to look distinguished. She hoped "older" didn't mean _too_ much older—she didn't like waiting.

* * *

_You've kept me waiting a long time._

Jasper didn't understand it. It didn't make sense. He couldn't have words on his arm—not _him_. He was seventy-three years old, for Christ's sake. Why _now?_

It unnerved him that they had appeared without his noticing. Last night, before the skirmish with the Chiapas coven, there had been no words. This morning, when he had looked down at the stinging new bite on the inside of his elbow—_words_. Where had they come from?

He was familiar with the old human party line about soulmate words, of course. That they were a gift from God, meant to help the blessed find their true earthly match among the opposite sex, the ideal, divinely ordained spouse with whom they were destined to be fruitful and multiply. He didn't set much stock by it. The people who preached such things threw fits when confronted with same-sex soulmates, whose existence they could never manage to explain.

Such trite reasoning couldn't explain vampire soulmates, either. Vampires didn't need a soulmate to be fruitful and multiply—they had perfectly good venom for that.

And yet, Jasper suspected that the percentage of vampires with destined soulmates was even greater than the corresponding percentage of humans. He had no evidence, only anecdotal observation. But he'd been ripping off arms for more than half a century now, plenty long enough to notice that a staggering number of them bore words.

Sometimes when he tore off an arm with words he questioned his own motives. Was he punishing his enemies for possessing what he didn't? Deep down, he knew that wasn't it. To someone like him, whose arm had never borne even the merest inkblot and—or so he had always assumed—never would, other people's words were merely curiosities.

Besides, experience had taught him that the words could only mean trouble for a vampire. He didn't need a soulmate. He couldn't afford the liability, the divided loyalties. He had work to do.

And yet.

_You've kept me waiting a long time._

Looking at the words made a hollow sort of ache form in his chest.

They were small, neat letters, unremarkable except for the extra flourishes on the Y and the G's—hints of ostentation. The pristine black made a strange contrast with the ruin of his arm, scars upon scars in a snarled lattice. By all rights, there shouldn't have been space left for so much as a speck—but there the words were anyway, gleaming fresh and bold and dark against the background of leathery half-moons.

_You've kept me waiting a long time,_ they said. Defiant.

There was a real person attached to them, somewhere. A real vampire. Jasper wondered whether there were corresponding words on her smooth, unmarred arm. He refused to imagine the rest of her—he couldn't allow her to become too real.

Maria called his name from outside. Likely wondering what was taking so long. She didn't take kindly to dallying.

Jasper tugged his sleeve back down, covering the words. Maria didn't need to see them. They could stay hidden. He would do his best to forget they were there. He wouldn't dwell on the tingling of his arm, subtler and more permanent than the sting of venom, a phantom pulse of warmth.

He allowed himself one final thought before he put the words out of his mind: it was a strange first greeting. _You've kept me waiting a long time._

_I'm sorry,_ he thought. _You'll be waiting a while longer._

* * *

hope you enjoyed reading! come find me over on tumblr (url is volturialice) if you'd like to talk twilight!


End file.
